"Since my birth--or at least since I had lost my mother in early infancy, my path had been cast upon thorns and brambles--blows and stripes, cold neglect, reprehension, and debasing slavery; to such was I doomed. I had longed for something to love--and in the desire to possess something whose affections were my own, I had secreted at school a little nest of field mice on which I tended; but human being there was none who marked me, except to revile, and my proud heart rose in indignation against them. Mrs. Rivers had heard a sad story of my obduracy, my indolence, my violence; she had expected to see a savage, but my likeness to my mother won her heart at once, and the affection I met transformed me at once into something worthy of her. I had been told I was a reprobate till I half believed. I felt that there was war between me and my tyrants, and I was desirous to make them suffer even as they made me. I read in books of the charities of life--and the very words seemed only a portion of that vast system of imposture with which the strong oppressed the weak. I did not believe in love or beauty; or if ever my heart opened to it, it was to view it in external nature, and to wonder how all of perceptive and sentient in this wondrous fabric of the universe was instinct with injury and wrong. "Mrs. Rivers was a woman of feeling and sense. She drew me out--she dived into the secrets of my heart; for my mother's sake she loved me, and she saw that to implant sentiments of affection was to redeem a character not ungenerous, and far, far from cold--whose evil passions had been fostered as in a hotbed, and whose better propensities were nipped in the bud. She strove to awaken my susceptibility to kindness, by lavishing a thousand marks of favour. She called me her son--her friend; she taught me to look upon her regard as a possession of which nothing could deprive me, and to consider herself and her daughter as near and dear ties that could not be rent away. She imparted happiness, she awoke gratitude, and made me in my innermost heart swear to deserve her favour.